these things i've never known
by 40millionyears
Summary: five things that (probably) (didn't / don't / won't) happen to don & sloan.
1. Chapter 1

**these things i've never known**

_five things that (probably)(didn't / don't / won't) happen to don & sloan._

**pt i: remember when we first met (and love was just a bet)**

He sees her across a crowded room.

_(yeah, it's a cliché. sometimes the best ones are.)_

It's New Year's Eve, and ACN is welcoming 2009 with its customary newsroom party. Don isn't generally the biggest fan of these things, but Don is a big fan of free beer and watching his co-workers embarrass themselves, and really, he has nowhere else to be.

He knows who she is, obviously. The newsroom is no better than a high school cafeteria when it comes to gossip and innuendo, and the new financial reporter with two PhDs and legs for days has generated more than her fair share of both. She's navigating it well, he thinks, although why he's come to that conclusion now he's not entirely sure. She's been at ACN for probably four months, but they're in such different orbits that he honestly can't remember giving her much thought at all.

(_but he's a perceptive guy. he sees things. and he sees her do her show at two and four, dispensing advice and predictions he won't even pretend to wholly understand while seemingly unfazed by the mass amounts of bullshit that come with the territory of being a beautiful professional woman, and he finds her fortitude far more impressive than her legs._

_maybe he's given her some thought after all.)_

It's 11.42pm and he's had just enough beer that properly introducing himself to her seems like an excellent idea. Don's well aware of his own reputation around the office. He's smug, he's stubborn, he's difficult to work with. He's also usually okay with it. It's not that he's a bad guy, it's just that nice guys don't get anywhere in this business and Don, Don wants to get somewhere. He thinks that Sloan, who must have crushed more than a few egos to get to where she is and who is currently standing on her own and fiddling with her Blackberry in a pose that suggests she's even less comfortable at this party than he is, might understand.

It still takes him another half a beer to act.

In the twenty-seven seconds it takes him to cross the room to get to her, he considers his potential opening lines. Ends up reaching her before he can decide on one. Goes with a classic.

"Hi."

She smiles, the mildly confused smile of a person who's pretty sure they've been mistaken for someone else.

"Hi?"

"Hi. I'm Don. Uh, Don Keefer. I'm a producer on…"

She nods. "I know."

"Oh."

They drift into a silence that is almost definitely completely awkward. He considers his next move. Can't really come up with anything. Don cultivates his self-assured-bastard newsroom persona with alarming credibility, but confidence is a trick that took him years to master.

_(she undid it in forty-nine seconds and he doesn't know what to make of that._

_something tells him he's going to be giving her a lot of thought from now on.)_

Then she shakes her head. "Fuck. Sorry. I thought that since I knew who you were that you also… I don't… Sloan. Is me, I mean. I'm Sloan. Sabbith."

The difference between her totally composed television persona and this… whoever this person is is spectacular. It's endearing. It's totally fucking confusing and like any good journalist he immediately needs to figure it (her) out.

"It's okay, I did, actually. Know who you were. Kind of. But it's good to meet you, Sloan Sabbith."

"You too."

He gestures vaguely at her Blackberry and her glass of flat champagne and her solitude. "This not really your thing?"

"You know, I've only been here a little while. And New Year's Eve sucks in general. But it was this or watching the ball drop from my couch. Or, one of my students did invite me to a house party, but that invitation seemed neither appropriate nor enticing."

"You're a professor as well?"

"At Columbia. Just one class a semester now, though."

"How'd you move into reporting?"

"College seniors are surprisingly easy to teach. They listen. They want to listen, for the most part. I thought taking on the general public might present more of a challenge."

Don nods. He gets it. He might be on the other side of the camera, but the kind of news he wants to produce has always been about – been for – the people. Whether they like it or not.

"So why are you here alone?"

He chokes a bit on his beer. "Wow. You don't want to segue into that topic of conversation?"

She shrugs, unapologetic. "I'm not that great at segues. You would have noticed."

"Because going there directly went so smoothly for you."

"Did you want to make small talk about the canapés instead? I could do that. Or I could tell you about federal banking regulations. They're really my only three conversation starters."

"What kind of parties do you go to that 'federal banking regulations' are considered a good conversation starter?"

"Economics conferences, mainly. But I think it could have worked on this crowd. I think I could have sold it."

"There's no crowd. There's me."

"Let's not get caught up in the math." She's smiling at him more genuinely now, and he notices the freckles on her nose as it crinkles. He thinks he's enamoured. He's never been enamoured before so he can't be positive, and he's open to the possibility that it's partially the beer talking, but Sloan Sabbith is standing there with her bad economics jokes and her seeming inability to carry a normal conversation and her ever-widening smile, and this has to be what it feels like.

He goes for it.

"I'm here alone because I didn't have anyone to bring, obviously."

"I figured."

"How's that?"

"People say you're kind of an asshole. Although so far, I have to say, it doesn't seem to be true."

It's been eight and a half minutes and somehow he's already not offended by her blunt candor, so he just chuckles, because _really? _"You have interesting interpersonal skills, you know that?"

"I've been told as much, although usually in harsher terms."

_(he's had the pleasure of knowing plenty of women in his life. dated quite a few of them. was born to a particularly remarkable one. none of them have ever simultaneously frightened and fascinated and frustrated him the way she's managed to in the last nine minutes.)_

They lapse again into a silence that's a little less awkward than the last. Don's not quite sure where to go from here. Women are supposed to let you know if they're into you, right? There's a… signal. There should be a signal. He's fairly certain he's not sensing a signal, and although she's small, he's also fairly certain that she could beat him up if she wanted to. But it's 11.59pm and her eyes are warm and he hasn't wanted to kiss a woman the way he inexplicably wants to kiss _this _woman in a really long time.

_(eight… seven… six…)_

She turns to raise her champagne glass in a mock toast, and the beer's emboldened him and the little smile playing on her face is encouraging him and his brain's saying "fuck it fuck it fuck it", so he takes the last step forward and kisses her as the clock strikes and the room erupts.

(_one)_

The stars don't come out. The earth doesn't stop moving and the lights don't dim. It's not that kind of a moment. But she kisses him back and her body presses a little more against his and it's a pretty damn good way to ring in midnight.

_(she also doesn't punch him. in about three and a half years, he'll look back and be very grateful for that.)_

Nineteen minutes ago he'd convinced himself that he'd never even thought about her.

It's 12.01am, and for a moment, the incontrovertible cynic in Don believes in something a little bit like fate.


	2. Chapter 2

**these things i've never known**

_five things that (probably)(didn't / don't / won't) happen to don & sloan_

modelled after the decade-old 'five things' meme that spawned so much good fic back in the day, a series of unrelated stories that diverge from canon at various points.

this chapter contains continued abuse of parentheses, capitalization, and many other standard conventions of grammar. also some angst and a weird extended weather/fire/lighthouse metaphor. or something.

* * *

**pt ii: the world does not stop turning round (there's no big tragedy)**

****Genoa ruins them. In more ways than one.

Charlie, Will, and Mac all resign, the media equivalent of a dishonourable discharge. Their senior staff follows very shortly after. Because that's what they do. They take the hit and stand strong in their solidarity; steadfastly, unequivocally believing in doing the right thing.

_(doing the right news. look how that worked out.)_

But solidarity only goes so far in the face of scandalized unemployment, and one by one the participants in their broken little experiment scatter across the world like shards of glass from the wreck that NewsNight became.

Mackenzie disappears in a frenzy of promises to stay in touch that she and Sloan both know are equally well-intentioned and improbable. Will catches the first cross-country flight available to a media relations firm in California still willing to have him. Maggie goes back to Uganda.

Jerry Dantana doesn't get a cent from ACN.

_(he got everything else.)_

And for a blessed short while, Sloan and Don hold the centre. They drink beer on her balcony and continue a rather half-assed fantasy football league – Don's adamant that the commissioner can't have a team, Sloan reminds him that she's the only other person involved and that one team by definition doesn't make a league, Don questions her definition, and a cushion is thrown – and absolutely under no circumstances do they talk about ACN.

For a minute, Sloan begins to think that they'll actually make it. That somehow they became the eye of this storm. That the spark that's been smouldering between them since Fukushima will ultimately become a blaze, and that the two of them will sustain each other because the storm has to pass at some point. It's a meteorological certainty. Sloan can work with certainty.

_(she just forgot about the path of destruction in its wake.)_

There's a moment one night, after four and a half beers and a failed attempt at trading her quarterback for the rest of his team, when the blaze almost ignites. It ends up feeling less like a new beginning and more like a survivor's desperate attempt to pick through the ashes for anything that's salvageable from the past.

It flickers and burns out.

Two weeks later, he takes a job in Chicago. "It's the second city!" he says with forced cheer, as though that didn't mean departing the _first _city. He tells her he's leaving, and she waits for the punch line.

_(she knows this, keeps it somewhere in that place at the back of her mind that's reserved for those things she knows but doesn't want to: it's not just the city he's leaving.)_

She wills her face to school into something resembling impassivity, and as far as she can tell she's about 80% successful.

"Okay."

She doesn't need to ask him why he's going, and she doesn't know how to ask him to stay. They've been here before, but she doesn't have his confidence in the difference three days can make to their situation. Sloan understands statistics and certainties, and she's never been able to break Don Keefer down by either.

_(she wishes the rise and fall of people's emotions were as easily chartable as stocks, or half as predictable.)_

In three days his number's been disconnected and without walking the twenty-four familiar blocks she knows that someone else's books are lining the walls of his apartment. Sloan's broken up with – been broken up with by – her fair share of boyfriends. Even a fiancé, once. Don was neither, and it never hurt like this before.

But the storm still passes.

_(certainty.)_

The storm passes and Sloan debates her options. Staying in New York is non-negotiable. It's where her life is, and someone has to be here for when the others eventually find their way back, when the dust has settled. She'll be their lighthouse. By virtue of her (almost) impeccable resume and her (completely) unarguable screen presence, she ends up being offered primetime positions at any number of networks.

_(sometimes she checks the weather forecast for illinois, as if the windy city will blow him back, and on clear nights she can't help but hope, just a little._

but they're separated by more now than geography and cloudy skies.)

She accepts tenure at Columbia instead and spends her days dedicated to teaching the next generation of economists to be better than she is. In more ways than one.

_(the lights don't guide him home.)_


End file.
